cdh

OK. Sample 1 was good for 4 infusions in the yixing pot, then petered out. Aroma and flavor are a bit diffuse, but certainly hinting at where this style of oolongs can go. Perhaps tomorrow I'll try a more gongfu style of preparation and see if that can amp up the intensity, or if this particular batch is just more muted.

Sample 1: This says it is a Tie Guan Yin, and smells and tastes the part. This is about an 8g sample, so it presents 3 or 4 chances at brewing this. My first yields a tasty, if undistinguished oolong. This is a medium-roasted example, I'd say... not the floral brilliant green aromas of the very low roasted, but not the toasty woodsy well-roasted types... somewhere between the two. 2g of this in a yixing pot with 185F water needs a rinse to open up the tightly balled up leaves. Not a very strong aroma, but definitely in the style. In the cup the green-oolong flavor predominates, with woodsy notes around the edges. Not a huge length of flavor... no lingering aftertaste after a couple of minutes. Better than the commodity grade TKY that you can get in a can at Ten Ren.... but there's much better out there in the world.

Depends on whether your objective is to see and feel the bubbles or to taste the wine. Fizzy wine in goblets rather than flutes facilitates smelling and tasting, but doesn't put the fizz on the center stage.

The other week I was poking around on Aliexpress for tea, and I came across an appealing looking assortment of samples. 30something varieties for somewhere around $7.50. Seemed it was worth the risk. It finally arrived. I intend to taste my way through these and share my notes here.

Found a chunk of this in my tea cupboard too and decided to brew it up yesterday. The barnyardy funk was there in the dry leaves, and persisted into the first few infusions... dissipated thereafter. The sweet woodsy flavor seemed to accented with an almost banana-ester thing going on in the 3rd through 6th infusions... then that dissipated as well. Pretty clear evidence that maturation brings chemical transformations in this kind of tea.

That leads to the question of how national their sourcing is for beef and such. I'd imagine they would try to keep shipping distances, particularly in refrigerated trucks, to a minimum, just out of cost saving motives... Would my Aldi in PA be likely to have beef from the same sources as yours in OK? That would be interesting to find out.

I'm really enjoying the ManSai leftovers as well. The 5 year old observations still hold true about flavor profile, e.g. early infusions have some phenolic smoke that washes away after a couple of 20-second infusions, then it becomes just an intense low-level fruitiness... a bit lemongrass without the aromatics, but something more. This Puerh is amazing for its length of flavor (and longevity in the cupboard). I'm still enjoying the aftertaste of the infusion I finished half an hour ago. I'm going to have to go hunting for more of these sheng type puerhs. This stuff is really striking a chord with me now that must not have 5 years ago.

Get a flashlight and look inside. The kickstarter mentioned a ceramic insulation layer... and the the inside walls look to be screen over a white surface. I'm betting that white stuff is a ceramic shell. No telling how far up it goes or what would hold it in place if it stopped short of the cap.

My concern about that route is that there is some sort of ceramic insulation inside, and I'd not want to break that by drilling through it.

Going though my tea cupboard, I ran across the leftovers of the ManSai and ManMai from this tasting. Decided to give them a taste now in my effort to drink away all of the little leftovers that have accumulated. The ManMai is the first I grabbed, so is the first I'm brewing up. I've decided that the little cups method was a bit silly and fussy, and decided instead to try something else in my tea brewing repertoire... the insulated mug with infuser basket. And it has been quite successful so far now that I'm 5 or 6 infusions in. I'm also now using a kettle that keeps water in a 10F temperature band, so I've dialed in 190F, so it varies from 185 to 195. I'm probably brewing in about 10 ounce batches. My method has been to pour the water over the leaves in their basket until they're covered, then pull the basket out once the desired time has elapsed from when they were covered. Times have all been less than a minute so far, and the results have been delicious. All they say about puerh's capacity to age gracefully is obviously true. This tea has got staying power, both on the shelf, as the 5+ years it was in the back of the cupboard did nothing to harm it, and in the infuser, as I'm drinking infusion 6 now, and it is still quite deliciously flavorful. The ManMai has gone from grassy to more generally herbacious in the initial infusions. Now I'm starting to get citrus-y hints in the aftertaste, which just goes on and on.

Drilled em out? Or how did you handle it?

This is one out of 4 screws. I'm leaning in the direction of not replacing it. Just the one stuck screw is keeping the screen retaining ring firmly in place.

Visegrips didn't do it. Any more thoughts before the tungsten drill bits come out? If I had a dremel with a rotary hacksaw blade, I might be able to cut a channel for a flat screwdriver... but I don't have that handy.

Impact tools are out of the picture... they'll dent the cone before they move the screw. Gonna give the vice grips a try today.

Best idea I've gotten yet is to call up Dave Arnold's radio show and ask him for advice... he made it, after all... and the support forums are dead as a doornail.

Has anybody here successfully swapped out screens? It's that time, and mine is putting up quite a fight. One of the 4 philips-head screws that holds the screen retaining ring in place has stripped such that the screwdriver can't move it. And it seems the ring itself has gotten pretty stuck in place. Right now the whole unit is sitting on the drill press, having been given a good dousing with PB Blaster to try to break things loose. Anybody have ideas to try before just drilling out the dead screw?

I've gone through 4 tanks of gas, and am approaching the time to swap out the screens... I use mine in a bit of a backwards fashion... I pull a steak or a piece of salmon out of the freezer, season and sear, then worry about getting the middle up to temperature... can't think of a better way to get nice brown sear on the outside of a piece of salmon and make the interior that perfect 110F.

Ceramic paring knives fit the bill... cheap, sharp, useful.

Interesting design... I'm happy with my gen 1 Sansaire so don't need... but I'd heartily advise anybody thinking of making the plunge into the sous vide waters to consider this.

Been too long since I made that tomato chutney. So good! Thanks for the reminder.

Today's avocado farming topic seems a perfect case in point for this observation.

Seems as much a general hand-wringing about the fact that Latin America is pretty much an old-style feudalist agricultural economy, with lots of beaten down peasants laboring for environmentally destructive (narco)lords and the like... and they want to paint it as a terrible situation that enlightened folks should not be supporting. The globalists' riposte seems to be that such an economy is Latin America's competitive advantage, so let them depress prices and increase output all they can, because yum avocadoes. How do we as consumers deal with such situations? Agricultural labor has never been idyllic or easy work, no matter where it is done... Maybe the questions should be framed as which is worse for a properly informed bleeding heart: treatment of animals that become meat, or treatment of laborers without whom vegetables would never come to market? And just when you're about to become a fruititarian and only eat things trees drop on the ground, remember that for the tree that produces fruit to be there, the environment was disrupted and water was redirected to make that tree possible too. As for me, I eat it all, and believe that agriculture is better than the alternative of foraging for everything.

El Harissa proved a great spot for lunch for Alex, Mrs Alex, Tammy and me... many tastes of middle eastern deliciousness. Tammy had business to achieve and accomplish after lunch, but left me with fine brewery recommendations to fill the gap between lunch and dinner. Both the Wolverine State Brewery's large list of lagers and the Glass House Brewery provided a fine afternoon of tasty goodness. Delicious food and drink were consumed at the Last Word... excellent pick, Tammy! And the post party shenanigans at Ann Arbor Distillery were fantastic. That Madras Mule was a fantastic cap to a great day!

Executive decision made. I'm off to Dexter... either doing recon, or amusing myself, depending on others feelings.

I've made it to Ann Arbor, and am sitting in the Jolly Pumpkin bar downtown. I am interested in visiting their brewery in Dexter.... might this be a good activity for after lunch and before dinner Friday, or should I do this on my own this evening?